Crypto News: Spanish Airlines Partners With Bitpay To Accept Crypto Payments

Vueling S.A., European low-cost airline in Spain, has sealed partnership with American bitcoin payment service provider Bitpay to offer its customers the opportunity to make payments for tickets via cryptocurrency.

Vueling S.A. will utilise UATP for payment processing

The crypto payment option is expected to be made available at the start of 2023 to individuals only. Upon its availability, it would make Vueling the first low-cost airline in the whole of Europe to offer payment via crypto option to its customers.

The travel payment solution Universal Air Travel Plan (UATP) will be utilised for this payment method in order to ensure a seamless payment processing exercise. UATP generally provides payment solutions to airlines in the global scene.

In order to reduce incidence of fraud via this novel payment method, Vueling has revealed that the transaction would have the nature of a push payment rather than a pull payment. This means that customers would pay directly from their Crypto wallets by originating the transaction themselves.

Furthermore, prices for tickets would be displayed in EUR and users would have the liberty of paying the equivalence of any of 13 cryptocurrencies including but not limited to Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Dogecoin (DOGE), Litecoin (LTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

airBaltic became the first airline to accept crypto

While Vueling S.A. would be the first low-cost European airline to accept Crypto payment, it wouldn’t be the first airline to toe this line as just last month, Dubai-based air company Emirates Airline revealed plans of accepting payments for tickets in Bitcoin (BTC) soon.

UK-based travel company Alternative Airlines has for some time given its customers in the global scene the ability to pay for flight tickets using Bitcoin through any of the two crypto payment providers Utrust and crypto.com.

Nonetheless, acceptance of Crypto as payment for flight tickets began with Latvian air carrier airBaltic when the airline made a decision to accept payment via Crypto in 2014, making it the first ever air company to do so. Others have since followed suit, especially with the growing interest in cryptocurrencies and mainstream adoption noticed.